The interruption is not where the journey ends. It is where another one begins.
A body becomes an obstacle; a polished surface breaks open; a line changes direction just before arriving. In Coitus Interruptus, Siegfried Contemporary brings together 25 works by Key Hiraga, Takuro Kuwata, Jonathan Trayte and Tim Fluck, spanning almost sixty years, from 1967 to works made specifically for the exhibition in 2026. The title moves beyond its sexual meaning. Here, interruption is not understood as failure, but as the point at which expectation gives way to another possibility.
The exhibition takes as its historical point of departure five works by Japanese artist Key Hiraga (1936–2000) from 1967–71, the decisive years in which his extraordinary psychosexual world took shape. As a young man in Tokyo, Hiraga had already encountered the city’s pleasure culture while working in a tattoo parlour in Asakusa. After moving to Paris in 1965, however, a more permissive sexual climate and the nightlife he observed there transformed his painting: monochromatic, calligraphic works gave way to intense colour, pattern and fragmented erotic bodies. “Mr H.”, the recurring protagonist of these pictures, has been described as Hiraga’s own double. His bodies refuse to behave properly: anatomy fragments, gender becomes unstable and pleasure is repeatedly undermined by embarrassment or dark humour. Hiraga was included in MoMA’s landmark travelling exhibition The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture and represented Japan at the 10th São Paulo Biennial in 1969.
In “The Elegant Life of Mr. H.” (1970), an elongated pink form lies across the protagonist’s lap, somewhere between limb and phallus, object and obstruction. Such ambiguity runs throughout Hiraga’s work: the eye recognises something only for that certainty to disappear a moment later.
It is precisely this instability that connects Hiraga to the present. British artists Jonathan Trayte and Tim Fluck have created new works for the exhibition in response to aspects of his visual language. In Trayte’s “Baby Doll” (2026), pink forms and light suggest a body without ever settling into one. Elsewhere, fruit becomes electrically charged and natural forms acquire the seductive artificiality of consumer objects. Fluck’s new porcelain sculptures take up Hiraga’s stripes and swollen forms more structurally, translating the logic of the painted body into precariously assembled objects.
Japanese artist Takuro Kuwata introduces another kind of interruption: one produced by matter itself. His work has radically expanded the language of the traditional tea bowl by embracing processes in which cracking or deformation becomes generative. In “Untitled” (2016), a mirror-like platinum surface splits open to expose a rough interior. In “Peach” (2025), hard bronze appears almost soft, its simple crease shifting quietly towards the bodily and erotic.
“I wanted to take Hiraga as a point of departure rather than build a historical exhibition around him. What interests me is the moment when an image or a desire stops behaving as expected. There is something wonderfully funny in Hiraga’s work, but also something unsettling. Bringing it into contact with work being made now keeps that tension alive. For me, interruption is not an ending; it is often where another possibility begins.”
— Andreas Siegfried, founder of Siegfried Contemporary
Coitus Interruptus is therefore less about influence than about what happens when works separated by generations begin to speak to one another. Forms approach recognition and then resist it. What looks like an interruption becomes a change of course.
With loans from Loeve&Co, Paris, for works by Key Hiraga, and Alison Jacques, London, for works by Takuro Kuwata.